The ten books every child should read before leaving school (or why I hate English Literature revisited)

"These are the ten books every child should read before they leave school". So proclaims the headline of yet another attempt to create a new canon - this time by the time-honoured process of surveying 500 English teachers. This list (with the possible exception of Harry Potter) is unsurprising - the obvious couple of George Orwell books, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, some stuff by Dickens and the godawful Pride and Prejudice (or Gold Diggers of 1815 as I like to call it).

It really is time these teachers got out from under their obsession with Dickens, Austen and 20th century American literature (almost all of which is much better in film than prose). And chose a different, more interesting, relevant and challenging set of texts for children to read. Is it any surprise that people are turned off reading for pleasure if the dreary existence of Lennie Small is rammed down their throats at school. I can't think of a less relevant book to a 14 year old Pakistani girl in Bradford.

And the same goes for the rest - again with the possible exception of Harry Potter. What we haven't got here is any literature that presses the sorts of button that film and TV are pressing in the minds of modern British children. And it shows, which is the worst failing of English literature as a subject, the sad narrowness of the way it's taught. So here's a two-fingered salute to the English teachers and Simon's list of ten books every child should read before leaving school (except I don't mean it, of course):

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson's birth of cyberpunk novel, a picture of the on-line world created before we were all on-line.
2. Dune - Frank Herbert's masterpiece: want to know where the Star Wars themes came from? A pseudo-religion based on mind control, a galactic empire, good vs evil, giant worms and psychoactive drugs on which everything depends.
3. Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner takes us to an over-populated world filled with pop-up ads, drive-by shootings, suicide bombers and dysfunctional governments
4. A good translation of Beowulf - either Tolkein's prose translation or the stunning (if less true to the text) epic poem by Seamus Heaney. This is where we come from - ur-England and we should not lose it
5. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks explores teenage violence including the eponymous wasp factory. More contemporary than Lord of the Flies by encompassing mental illness and isolation, issues of importance to teenagers
6. The Lord of the Rings - it wasn't voted the best novel for nothing and Tolkein's great work isn't merely a fantasy. It's themes grow out from the myths and legends of Northern Europe and link to the idea of quest and the powerful message that, in the end, we all have it within us to do the extraordinary
7. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - OK the original radio series probably sets the bar too high for later books and films but the books are funny, interesting and filled with thoughts and ideas that really do speak to modern life
8. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick's alternative history is brief, telling and a great reminder that we all have in us the capacity for good and for great evil.
9. I, Robot - Isaac Asimov's best robot book (and nothing at all like the film of the same name) coins the three laws of robotics which every child should discuss and debate for it really is their future now
10. Swallows and Amazons - we've sort of forgotten about how childhood should be and, more than any other novel, Arthur Ransome's tale of kids mucking about on boats in the Lake District is the best evocation of the glory years of childhood.

You can pick your own ten or a dozen or fifty. The point here is that my list is every bit as good - no better - than the list those English teachers have churned out. I think it would be great if every child read these books but I know that some would be hated - as I hate Pride and Prejudice - by young people forced to read them or told that this stuff they don't like is what we mean by "good literature". I'm sure that your list might feature a different emphasis - urban grit, mystery, romance or whimsy. There's no right answer and what we should be doing is hoping that every child reaches 18 having created their own list of ten fantastic books that really mean something, that they'll bore their own children about and maybe write up in indulgent blog posts.

Get reading folks!

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Ban everything, ban it now. For the children.

Back in early 1970s South London, I used to drag my self from bed, throw on clothes and some breakfast down my gullet, get on my bike and cycle to Elmers End News. Where, as generations of children before me had done, I picked up a bag of newspapers and shoved them through a load of doors. As it happens the round I did took me back over the railway bridge and past the cricket club (holding my nose at the stench from the paint factory and tannery) almost to home. I then got into my school uniform and cycled to school in SE19.

There was nothing unusual about all this, it was what loads of other children did. For sure there were some who had other jobs - milk rounds, serving in shops, washing cars at the garage, helping on a market stall. But children worked. In my case it was simple - once I was 13 and could get a paper round there was no more pocket money (as an aside my last pocket money amount was 12p).

Apparently all this wasn't a useful exercise in self-organising and an introduction to work but an offence to my rights:

Turning to newspaper delivery rounds, it said that “allowing children to work before school begins in the morning is, in principle, contrary” to the charter, because it puts at risk their “attendance, receptiveness and homework”.

This 'charter' is the European Social Charter (and before you all get anti-EU on me, this was signed by the UK in 1961 long before we joined that awful organisation) and it has apparently been captured by the 'wrap children in cotton wool' school of thinking along with the deranged idea that making children do anything is some sort of imposition rather than an education.

We live in a world where parents are told that just beyond their sight is a terrible dark place filled with stranger danger, with poisonous plants, with trees that might be climbed, with bicycles ridden dangerously without brakes down steep hills. The idea that an eight year old could safely walk half a mile to a bus stop, get on a bus across town and walk another few hundred yards to school - on his own (or with his nine-year-old sister) would horrify both our fussy authorities and most modern parents. Yet that is what I did every day of school - as did many other children.

And the idea that it infringes a teenager's rights to do an hour's work before school (so as to get a little money for the teenager to spend on sweets, comics, games, trips and records) is such manifest nonsense it makes one wonder what sort of weird old world the people who sit on the European Committee on Social Rights inhabit. I do know, however, that what we see is people who respond to everything they dislike with proposals for a ban, for restrictions, for controls. Instead of an exciting world for children to explore, these people see a world from which children must be protected. Until that day, after the hangover has passed from the 18th birthday party (although our social rights fascists almost certainly disapprove of drinking), when blinking and naive the fully fledged grown up is thrown into that big ole world to make his or her own way.

We damage children more by 'protecting' them, restricting their play, limiting their chances to learn about work and managing their social interactions to the extent that they become stultified, the very antithesis of fun. Everywhere we go there are signs designed to close off the world from children - don't climb trees, don't go on the grass, don't play ball games, don't run, don't sing, don't cross, don't do this, don't do the other. There are no signs that say please play here, have fun, take a risk or two, swim, run, laugh and dance.

Instead we see people who behave like the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - corralling children into a dull, purposeful programme of approved activities monitored by the agents of those authorities. Much of the effort here is dedicated to creating obedient little unchallenging conformists. And what we create are a bunch of snowflakes who demand safe spaces, who cry at criticism and who would rather ban free speech than accept that some people are unpleasant or rude. Disagreement is dealt with not through a handshake and "we'll talk about this again" but by one or other party running off to cuddle a teddy bear while listening to calming whale sounds.

"Ban everything, ban it now - for the children" is one of the most corrupting approaches to social policy ever. It creates weak-willed, dependent people who believe they've some sort of right never to be challenged, never to be upset and certainly never to be offended. And it is used - again and again - to control both the transition to being a grown up and to stop grown up people from doing things of which the controlling authorities disapprove. Don't drink - for the sake of the children. Don't smoke - the children, you know. Don't eat fat, salt or sugary foods - think what you're doing to the children.

None of this protects children. All it does is reinforce again the process of creating supine, subservient masses who, in the manner of Huxley's 'Brave New World', gladly accept authoritarianism - "for the good of the children".

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International housing affordability (and why planning is to blame)

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The latest figures on the most and least affordable cities in now out. Unsurprisingly Hong Kong still leads by a country mile:

For the fifth straight year, Hong Kong had the least affordable housing. Its median multiple was 19.0. Sydney became the second least affordable, at 12.2, leaping by 3.2 points, the largest annual increase ever recorded among major markets in the Survey. Sydney displaced Vancouver, which had the third least affordable housing among the major markets, with a median multiple of 10.8. This is up from 10.6 last year. Each of these is the highest median multiple recorded in these markets in the history of the Survey.

Three metropolitan markets tied in fourth position with a median multiple of 9.7, San Jose, Melbourne and Auckland. San Francisco was the 7th least affordable market, with a median multiple of 9.4, followed by London (8.5). San Diego and Los Angeles, which both had a median multiple of 8.1 (Figure 1).

Now there are a couple of important concerns that sit along side this unaffordability - the first is vulnerability to real estate risk (as measured by the delightfully named UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index:

Overall, the five cities rated by UBS as the most vulnerable are included among the eight least affordable in the Demographia Survey.

And next is that the driver of all this unaffordability, unsustainability and price volatility is the impact of urban containment policies:

Virtually all of the severely unaffordable major markets in this year’s Survey exercise urban containment policy. Meanwhile, no market without strong land use regulation has ever been rated as severely unaffordable in the 12 years of the Survey.

It is irrefutable that urban containment policies - green belts, zoning restrictions, development prioritisation and densification - are the primary driver of unaffordability. The sad thing is that politicians in the places that suffer from this lack of affordability simply deny that planning policies are in any way to blame.

So we can carry on ignoring the negative impact of planning with the resulting sky-high rents and property boom and bust, or else we can start to lift the straightjacket on development.

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A Conservative social justice caucus - can we strangle this at birth please.

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The great philosopher of "it's not fair", John Rawls can, I suspect, be blamed for planting the seeds of what is now called 'social justice':

“Historically one of the main defects of constitutional government has been the failure to insure the fair value of political liberty. The necessary corrective steps have not been taken, indeed, they never seem to have been seriously entertained. Disparities in the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed what is compatible with political equality have generally been tolerated by the legal system. Public resources have not been devoted to maintaining the institutions required for the fair value of political liberty."

We haven't got a 'just society' because the stuff isn't distributed fairly. And, in the ultimate philosophical cop out, Rawls made 'fair' and 'more equal' mean the same thing. So society - which Rawls conflates with government throughout his work - must act to make things more fair in order that all can enjoy liberty.

Our problem, however, isn't with Rawls but rather with this idea of 'equality' and the way in which it plays out in our society. Indeed Rawls stressed that 'the principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance' - justice is quite literally blind to race, gender, class, ability or any other characteristic. In the real world, of course, such a practice is essentially impossible. Most obviously this is true where society has an ingrained or institutional racial, gender or other bias (think apartheid South Africa or the antebellum US south not the campus of a liberal arts college). The problem is that the advocates of social justice have set out to create, instead of that 'veil of ignorance', a sort of checklist of 'fairness' that must be completed before any rule is passed, statement made or comment spoken.

You can, I hope, see the problem here and indeed the point at which the idea of social justice runs full tilt into other important ideas like liberty, democracy and choice. If the somewhat warped interpretation of Rawls that's popular in some circles is used, the result is a sort of soft (and sometimes not so soft) authoritarianism. On top of Rawls' concern about the distribution of wealth and income is piled a host of other inequities - of race, sex, gender, ability, history and place. So even when they are among the wealthiest and highest income, in Rawls' terms the most privileged, some individuals by dint of being black or female or gay or ill remain the victims of social injustice (that must be challenged and righted).

It's in the context of this understanding that I was fascinated by this announcement:

...a private group of Tory MPs has formed to try to help develop a stronger social justice agenda in their party which might help the Prime Minister – and whoever succeeds him – develop a proper Tory plan for tackling poverty. Its members describe the group as a ‘compassionate Conservative caucus’, and it includes an interesting bunch of members, including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Alistair Burt, David Burrowes, Stephen Crabb, Ruth Davidson, and Nadhim Zahawi. Number 10 officials also attended the group’s first meeting, which took place yesterday afternoon in Parliament, and included a talk from Bill Gates on tackling global health inequalities.

Now this, in terms of the Conservative Party, is a pretty powerful group seemingly committed to tackling 'injustices in society' and, interestingly, an ‘all-out assault on poverty’. This is, in many respects, the language of social democracy rather than conservatism. Indeed, if it is joined by the sort of agonies of language explored recently by Maria Miller, we see a significant element within the Party shifting towards a progressive 'liberal' (in the American meaning) agenda and away from what we'd more usually see as a conservative platform.

Unless that is, the agenda is to redefine the idea of 'social justice' - to escape from the straightjacket of campus identity politics, diversity top trumps and the closing down of speech for reasons of faux-offence. Perhaps this helps:

For many decades, under successive Governments, UK poverty has been defined narrowly by a measure of national income inequality. That is to say, households have been classified as living in poverty if they fall below a set income level, typically taken at 60 per cent national median income. Although this technique can be helpful in mapping low income areas, it is an arbitrary measurement of poverty, which reveals little about the reality of life in low income communities, and it offers no explanation or understanding about the root causes of poverty.

This - from the Centre for Social Justice - is a very different take on social justice. For sure, it's still about the injustice of persistent poverty but rather than seeing the problem as one of prejudice or exclusion because people belong to a group that suffers injustice, the CSJ sees the problem much more in terms of lifestyle - family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependency, addiction and debt. It's the old line rewritten - 'finish school, get a job and keep a job, get married and stay married'.

Now, while I'm not wholly convinced by the 'muscular christianity' of the CSJ's approach, it does have the merit of being a recognisably conservative agenda. The failure of some within society results from failure of institutions rather than the structure of society. Although some of the CSJ rhetoric seems quite judgemental, its core message is that the state should pay attention to stable families, better schools, job creation and the promotion of a 'good' lifestyle. This is the very antithesis of both the social justice idea derived from Rawls and also the concept of a liberal, open society. It also rejects that Thatcherite virtue - a small state serving a strong society. For the only way for politics to right the failings of those institutions (families, schools, employers, lenders) is for government to intervene.

These Tory social justice warriors with their 'compassionate conservativism' and love for state intervention represent a step back to paternalism and perhaps a worrying indulgence of the authoritarianism that has become the hallmark of left wing politics. I'm all for an all out war on poverty but we rather know how to beat it (clue - look at 200 plus years of free markets) but if this comes wrapped with the so-called 'social justice' that's crushing free speech in our universities, creating division from diversity in our cities and privileging group rights and group think above individual liberty then I really think it needs strangling at birth.

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Self-indulgent virtue signalling - the case of Justin Trudeau

There you have it. Once I've got past the temptation to throw up, I want you all to ponder the utter shallowness of this statement. This incredibly privileged and fortunate man has decided, in order to position himself as the pin up boy of self-righteous progressives everywhere, to adopt a series of trite positions that don't relate at all to good governance but signal Justin's saintliness.

Everything I see from Justin conforms to this virtue-signalling. From (and he continues in his father's tradition here) waving his children around as political props through to the sort of statements designed merely to get vacuous left-wing metrosexual folk whimpering. And he's wrong - feminism isn't an ideology worthy of us adopting it as a description, at least in its modern iteration. For all the good stuff about women's rights there's a victimhood about modern feminists that demeans the achievements of women who campaigned for the vote, for employment rights and to stop men raping or mutilating them.

And even if modern feminism was all brilliant, let's remember that Justin is just saying this for effect - it's a platitude, a mere construct to make him seem virtuous, modern and caring, a progressive godling.

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Quote of the day - on groupthink and identity politics

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David Paxton writing in an online magazine, Quillette:

The reason I don’t have much optimism for my argument is that those under the spell of identity politics are not seeking to end the fallacious thinking that causes racism, sexism or any other such thing. They merely seek to adopt it themselves to affect power dynamics. Upon dividing people into groups they then seek to achieve equality of outcome across them without realising that if there is a problem of discrimination in society, the principle of grouping people in such ways tends to be the cause.

The whole article is an excellent challenge to the idea of groupthink - I've written about this before, pointing out that our modern idea of diversity depends on putting us into boxes, on allocating us to groups.

However, there is a fundamental objection to the idea of “diversity” as practiced and promoted – it depends on us being defined solely by the groups of which we are (by choice, by birth or by accident) a member – or worse still to which we are allocated by the merchants of diversity. Someone isn’t an individual – they are Afro-Caribbean, LGBT, over-50, working-class, disabled, Jewish – only given identity through the mediation of a group.

So “diversity” as we see it in practice is focused on there being diverse groups rather than diverse individuals. The reality of our thoughts, ideas, loves, prejudices, opinions and attitudes – real diversity – are as nothing beside the squeezing of everyone into a pre-determined set of boxes.

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Some more good stuff for your reading lists

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Bradford West Labour Party - more fun for the politics watcher

"We would respectfully ask, out of courtesy, for a full explanation of the NECs decision to impose candidates in our constituency along with an explanation of the specific allegations without having to read in the press first.

"We are deeply concerned that the voice of our membership is being silenced and to this end we would ask the decision to impose candidates in Bradford West is overturned.

"We would welcome an urgent meeting with representatives of the NEC to further explain our concerns on behalf of our constituents."

Simple-minded lefties

Writing in the journal Political Psychology, a team of researchers led by the University of Montana psychologist Lucian Gideon Conway III reports the results of four studies that together call "into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals." It turns out that liberals and conservatives are both simple-minded, depending on the topic under discussion.

Are the Koch brothers really right-wing?

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

Is rhino farming the answer to poaching?

The push to lift the ban on selling rhino horn came from game breeders, John Hume and Johan Kruger, who claim that legalising the trade within the country will reduce rhino deaths - rhino horn is similar to our fingernails, and can actually be harvested without harming the animal. Hume also argued that if the ban on rhino trade continued, he'd no longer be able to afford to keep his 1,200 farmed rhinos.

Don Boudreaux respectfully takes Stephen Hawkings down several pegs

"The above, Prof. Hawking, is, as you know, what people who know nothing of physics often sound like when they rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of physical reality. And it’s pretty much what you, a brilliant physicist who knows nothing of economics, sound like when you rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of economic reality."

The dark side of the liberal, progressive left

"Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

Tyler Cowen guessing at when we'll have driverless cars

Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years. But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

...neoliberal orgasms - why capitalists have the best sex (or something)

Positioned as the ‘peak’ of sexual experience, orgasm is packed with sociocultural meaning. Exploring the construction of orgasm in Cosmopolitan magazine in the context of the shift towards a postfeminist sexuality and the neoliberal shift towards the rational management of sex as work, this article argues that magazines offer a ‘pedagogy of the body'...

Read responsibly.

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Tim Montgomerie perhaps needs to learn the difference between business and markets

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Montgomerie is on about Donald Trump and, in the main his little article is pretty much spot on. Except for this bit:

Conservative Brits may look on in amazement — but it’s worth remembering that Trump does have a point. It wasn’t Karl Marx who accused leading business people of being ‘all for themselves, and nothing for other people’. It wasn’t Friedrich Engels who condemned the ‘mean rapacity’ and ‘sneaking arts’ of many merchants and manufacturers. It was Adam Smith. The father of modern economics wasn’t an uncritical defender of free enterprise. He knew that markets could lead to extraordinary selfishness.

Or rather the last bit. Markets, where they are allowed to operate freely, are not selfish because they depend on the mutual benefit to buyer and seller. Nor was Adam Smith against free markets or even critical of free markets. What Adam Smith hated was mercantilism and the cartel, the core economic position of what I call 'business conservatives'. Sometimes this gets called 'crony capitalism' (a term widely used to illustrate what goes on in the US system and in the EU but was first coined to describe the rapacious kleptocracies of Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia).

We should be now have learned the lesson Tony Blair taught conservatives - that the old adage of the business conservative, "what's good for business is good for the nation", doesn't apply. It is what is good for consumers - for the people - that matters and we know that, in economic terms, 'good for the people' almost always equates to free enterprise and free trade. What Smith railed against was that businesses clubbed together to fix markets, that they pressured governments to introduce protectionism, and that they supported regulations that prevented new competition from developing. For Smith free trade and free enterprise were the solution not the problem.

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On Charlie Brooker's bigotry.

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Charlie Brooker thinks Conservatives are creatures with out soul.

"As opposed to self-important, smug, judgemental, ignorant, know-nothing dickheads like Charlie Brooker and all the luvvie numpties who pretend to care about the poor and downtrodden while pulling in vastly more cash than the average evil bankster or Tory scumbag. People whose commitment to caring for the poor is to shout a lot about how nasty some anonymous businessman is then jet off to their holiday home in Tuscany or the shiny, trendy private club in Soho. Followed by getitng paid by the Beeb or the Guardian to pen some corruscating inditement of evil capitalism before heading off to dinner with their lefty pals at some Michelin starred restaurant where they'll pay £500 a head and insult the staff. There is more soul and decency in a single Tory voter than in all these oh-so-important so-called comedians - it's just that people like Brooker have yet to twig what massive and monumental hypocritical twats they are."

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There's always most shoving where there's least room - Tulip Siddiq edition

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Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP made a storming ad hominem yesterday in parliament in which she accused the target of her hatred, Donald Trump, of everything short of eating babies. It was a tour-de-force of political hatchet jobs, loose on facts and big on sweeping statements.

Now don't get me wrong, I've not much time for Donald Trump. Indeed when the choice for Americans seems to between a demagogic nutter and Hillary Clinton, the USA really needs to examine what's wrong with its politics.

However, Tulip Siddiq needs to address something much closer to home - her Aunt is the prime minister of Bangladesh and leads a regime accused of a host of human rights violations from fomenting religious division through using the courts to suppress political opposition to arresting atheist bloggers. Here, from Human Rights Watch:

Political violence has continued since 2014 national elections that were boycotted by the opposition. Hundreds have been killed and injured, with both government forces and opposition militants responsible. The country’s security forces have carried out enforced disappearances, killings, and arbitrary arrests, particularly targeting opposition leaders and supporters, with impunity. The ruling Awami League has put increasing pressure on the country’s already beleaguered civil society. Following the Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013 that killed more than 1,000 garment workers, labor laws were amended to make it easier for workers to unionize, but this has not stopped intimidation and threats. Unfair war crimes trials arising out of Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence continue, followed by executions of those convicted.

Perhaps the thing most relevant to Siddiq's attack on Trump is the official support in Bangladesh for clamp downs on 'atheists':

It was not until two hours later that Mohiuddin, a self-declared "atheist," was arrested. He was the fourth of the so-called "atheist" bloggers taken into police custody since April 1 in the country for writing articles that Islamist fundamentalists found defamatory. The arrest came as Mohiuddin was recovering from wounds he suffered in an attack allegedly carried out by Islamist fundamentalists in January.

So when Siddiq attacks Trump for religious bigotry, she is also attacking her Aunt who leads a regime that is actively promoting a religious monoculture. Indeed (and this may be because he hasn't thought of it yet) Trump hasn't called for the imprisonment of US Muslims - Sheikh Hasina, Siddiq's aunt, is complicit in the incarceration of people simply for being atheists who criticise Islam.

So the message that should go to Tulip Siddiq isn't any sort of cheery well done for her ad hominem on Donald Trump but rather to ask why she's said nothing about the gross human rights abuses in the country where her aunt in prime minister? As my mum always said - there's always most shoving where there's least room!

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The case against modern public health

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Public health is not healthcare. It is the authoritarian encapsulation of a nebulous concept usually called "wellbeing". Public health assumes that we, as humans, seek wellbeing and that our understanding of the concept is the same as they have determined.

...it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law (immunizations, seat belts), it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of every age and stage. Second, preventive medicine is presumptuous, confident that the interventions it espouses will, on average, do more good than harm to those who accept and adhere to them. Finally, preventive medicine is overbearing, attacking those who question the value of its recommendations.

Worse still this idea of 'preventive medicine' offers a further false prospectus by suggesting to the purseholders of health care systems that by embracing interventionist public health those systems will reduce their costs.

...the report also makes an economic argument for preventive care, highlighting the possibility of reducing healthcare spending -- which in 2011 reached $2.7 trillion, just shy of 18 percent of gross domestic product -- by billions of dollars. And that has health economists shaking their heads.

"Preventive care is more about the right thing to do" because it spares people the misery of illness, said economist Austin Frakt of Boston University. "But it's not plausible to think you can cut healthcare spending through preventive care. This is widely misunderstood."

As that quote indicates this argument is entirely false:

Despite the costs associated with the ageing population, it is sometimes claimed that people who are at risk of premature mortality due to lifestyle factors are a 'drain on the taxpayer'. Smokers, drinkers and the obese, in particular, are blamed for rising costs to the general taxpayer.

These claims do not stand up against evidence. If one looks at the lifetime costs to all public services, it is clear that the 'longevity-related' costs of healthier people are considerably higher than the 'lifestyle-related' costs of less healthy people. Acute healthcare costs are usually higher, long-term healthcare costs are invariably higher, and welfare costs (eg. pensions) are vastly higher.

And this, of course, assumes that the public health or preventative health measures are effective. The sad truth is that many of them - smoking cessation programmes being a good example - are expensive and largely ineffective. Local authorities are funding weight loss clinics - in direct competition with a huge private sector - when, again, the evidence of their effectiveness is pretty limited.

However the main objection to public health programmes isn't their cost or that they don't work, it is rather that their advocates seek to direct your choice - to urge you to eschew pleasure - in the expectation that you will see the benefits in a possibly longer, healthier life. Although the proponents of public health have laid claim to the idea of wellbeing, their approach to its promotion is to remove pleasure and happiness in order to impose an approved and safe form of wellbeing, a sort of dull, dreary '70s Sunday afternoon contentment.

Public health is an ideology of control not a healthcare programme. It dulls the senses of health management by suggesting their inevitable cost pressures will be relieved by patients embracing an approved lifestyle that eliminates the risks contributing to the growing number of people living with chronic conditions like type-2 diabetes. Above all public health represents a crusade to promote a moral and righteous life to the populace - don't smoke, don't drink, don't stay up late, do the right amount of exercise, eat the right diet, avoid salt and sugar. This lifestyle is promoted through the use of public funds to appeal, on one hand, to our fear of mortality through talk of cancer, heart attacks and dementia, while simultaneously suggesting that beautiful, successful people adhere to this stultifying, dull set of consumption behaviours. Across all this runs the argument that, if we want our children to be one or those beautiful, successful people - or even to live - then they mustn't be exposed to these sins of diet or pleasure.

It is hard to think of a section of government that so completely (and for its practitioners unconsciously) embraces the warnings about soft totalitarianism set out by Orwell and Huxley - and especially the latter with his observation that totalitarianism would be a matter of acceptance not something violently imposed by a powerful, all-seeing state. Restrictions on our lives - repeat the mantra of don't smoke, don't drink, eat the right food - are accepted because the experts with their evidence tell us that embracing these restrictions is the right thing. Just as as self-appointed stasi helped enforce the smoking ban, we will see similar as new fussbuckets arise to challenge those who drink openly, who eat sugary or salted foods.

The truth about public health spending is that nearly all of it is wasted, is money spent on promoting an ideology of control. No lives are saved by public health's actions. No money is saved for the wider health system by the interventions of public health. No-one's wellbeing is improve by public health. Indeed for many thousands the actions of these ideologues result in a worse life. Yet in my city of Bradford over £30 million is spend on public health programmes, money that could fix the roads, could provide care for the elderly, could smarten up parks. Instead we'll spend it on nannying the hell out of the population, on promoting an unpleasant controlling ideology founded on a myth of wellbeing that has no basis in fact or substantive value to the poor masses it is being imposed upon.

It's time to stop all this. There is no case for public health as practiced today.

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"You're not entitled to your opinion": Plato, proto-fascism and the cult of the expert

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You're not entitled to your opinion insists philosophy lecturer, Patrick Stokes:

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Let's get the first thing out of the way. You may be entitled to your opinion but that doesn't stop it being a stupid opinion. And Stokes is right when he observes that students in his class have to argue for their opinion (it is, after all, a philosophy class) The problem is that, as is common in this argument about the value of opinion, Stokes then invokes Plato to substantiate his opinion on who else is allowed to have an opinion. This invocation is backed up with a particularly egregious example of bad opinions being given too much credence.

My problem with this isn't that (using Stokes' example) arguing against vaccination programmes has much validity but rather the wider difficulty in deciding who is or is not an expert. In the case Stokes cites, the distinction is easy but this is seldom the case when it comes to argument. Let's take economics and the example of Paul Krugman. Now Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the very acme of the expert, he is - in Stokes' view - entirely entitled to his opinion. Yet what we get as a result is statements made purely on the basis that 'I am an expert ergo my opinion is valid, you are not an expert ergo your opinion is not valid'.

I wrote about an occasion of Krugman's approach to being an expert a year or so ago:

When confronted with the moral argument that debt means having something now rather than later - meaning of course that we, given the likely timescale for debt repayment, are taking that from future generations - Krugman chooses instead to talk about the lack of graduate job prospects. Rather than addressing the real issue raised - government debt as deferred taxation, Krugman chooses to talk about a relatively minor labour demand issue.

And then when Angela Leadsom raises supply side considerations - how to help the economy create jobs - Krugman lapses into accusations that Ms Leadsom and others are ideologically motivated and using the current crisis to shrink the size of the state. At no point in this does Krugman respond to or consider whether there are any supply side constraints. He waffles vaguely that there's no evidence of supply side constraint (in the US) and states baldly that the whole problem is a matter of demand. More seriously - from the point of debate - he accuses others of insincerity and exploitation without evidence.

What we see here is a 'cult of the expert'. Krugman is right because he is an expert not because, as an expert, he has set out his opinion and refuted (with reason) the arguments from others that challenge that opinion. This is the core ideal of Plato's politics - that society would be better if its management wasn't left to the ignorance of everyman but determined by ruling philosophers. This proto-fascism is the prime cancer in European thought since it seeks to deny the ignorant agency while at the same time deciding ignorance on the basis of an ideology - "I am an expert and you are not".

The argument that Stokes puts forward - "equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse" - might have some validity if experts were limited by their expertise. We have no issue with a scientist making clear that ceteris paribus vaccines are safe and providing scientific evidence to support that opinion. Indeed decision-makers would be foolish to disregard such an opinion unless there was a substantial and evidenced challenge to it.

The problem is that relatively few things within public discourse are as clear as the example that Stokes is using. This means we either have competing experts or else a situation where there is no valid expert opinion. And we still face the problem as to who defines the expert - here's a good example.

A few days ago two academics, Sara Kalkhoran and Stanton Glantz, published a 'systematic review and meta-analysis' of ecigs and smoking cessation concluding that ecigs reduced rates of smoking cessation. Now these are experts (I think we can state, for the sake of our argument, that an academic publishing research is de jure an expert) so, using Stokes argument, we should be giving credence to their opinion. Indeed the World Health Organisation has done just that - using Glantz's research and comment as a core element in its published advice to policy-makers on ecigs.

The problem is this:

"The problems with the authors’ interpretation of the two papers mentioned above are as follows: The first study (Adkson et al) is not longitudinal as has been reported here – e-cigarette use was measured at follow up, the same time as quit status was ascertained. The second study (Hitchman et al) included smokers who were using e-cigarettes at baseline and therefore included smokers who may have tried to use e-cigarettes to quit and failed, and excluded smokers who successfully used e-cigarettes to quit. The authors of this meta-analysis had been previously informed by the authors of the Adkison paper that they were misreporting the findings.”

Such a damning response doesn't, of course, stop the 'public discourse, from presenting Glantz's work without challenge or question. Were Glantz simply an ideological advocate in the manner of Meryl Dorey (Stokes' anti-vaxxer) then he could be dismissed in the same manner. However Glantz is a tenured academic as well as an ideological advocate - his expertise remains even when other researchers present effective challenge. The same - which is why Stokes' position is wrong - applies to Paul Krugman. Without the possibility of some little boy pointing out the emperors lack of clothes, we have the prospect of rule by an ever less accountable 'intellectual' clique conforming to the central Platonic error - that society can be managed by clever men.

Since we're arguing here about the distinction between 'the man in Whitehall knows best' and 'trust the people', it makes sense to enquire which of these two positions manages society best. And there's lots of evidence - some scientific, some historical and some based in reason - arguing both sides. Indeed there are many supporters for the 'philosopher king' model of rule by experts despite the evidence from Soviet Russia, from Germany and, more recently from Cuba or Venezuela that such a model will always (you can't think of everything) result in sub-optimal outcomes. Including some sub-optimal outcomes that result in millions dying painful and premature deaths.

Today this cult of the expert more and more governs our decision-making:

Right across government we see decision-making that should be done by people accountable to the public being done by the unelected - local enterprise partnerships, schools forums, probation boards, a veritable host of the unelected and unaccountable. This is post-democracy - consultation, partnership and the 'professional' have replaced the tried and tested process of electing people to make decisions on our behalf. We have decided that democracy - elections, MPs, councillors and so forth - are a bit of a pain. Or rather we haven't decided, the system has gradually sidelined politicians - the people's representatives - to the stage where the only way for us to effect any change is for us to join in the game, to play at post-democracy.

Democracy isn't modern and it runs counter to our cult of the expert, our obsession with that unreachable ideal of 'evidence-based policy'. So the powerful have emasculated democracy and replaced it with a pretty spectacle, a place of sound and fury. Great fun, as observers of parliament know, but ultimately pointless. The decisions are made somewhere else.

And so long as men like Patrick Stokes, for noble reasons and using egregious examples like Meryl Dorey, promte that cult of the expert to students will will continue to undermine liberty in the cause of better government, to take a few more baby steps towards the Platonic ideal of a fascist autocracy where all-knowing philosophers order society in the interests of a supine unquestioning (for questioning the expert is a sin) mass of the population.

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We all know this of course....

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It's just that we keep trying to pretend that the problem is something else - the housing finance system, the evil housebuilders stockpiling land, immigration, selfish baby boomers, almost anything but the real culprit:

Both the center-Left and center-Right have come together in agreement on the depth of New Zealand's housing affordability and its principal cause, overly restrictive urban planning regulations. Labour Party housing spokesperson (shadow minister) Phil Twyford and Oliver Hartwich, executive director of the New Zealand Initiative, wrote in a co-authored New Zealand Herald commentary:“Our own research leaves no doubt that planning rules are a root cause of the housing crisis, particularly in Auckland…”

Auckland is one of the world's ten most unaffordable cities (as, of course, is London). And the reason for this is a restrictive planning regime. Why do we pretend that this isn't true for London?

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Some stuff worth reading...on open borders, Bowie, vegans and High Street robots (plus other goodies too!)

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The Islamophobic Case for Open Borders

"In America, 77% of those raised Muslim, are still Muslim, according to Pew. That’s a fairly high retention rate, but Islam in the West still loses about one-fourth of each Muslim-born generation. At that rate of member loss, less than half of the descendants of Muslims would still be Muslim after three generations. Germany’s assimilation of Turkish migrants seems to illustrate how this process plays out. Less than 2% of the German population self-identifies as Muslim. Almost twice as many people in Germany are of Turkish descent, and there are also substantial numbers of Arabs. Since Turkey’s population is almost exclusively Muslim, it seems that Islam must have lost roughly half of the natural increase of its emigrants in Germany to apostasy."

Bowie was an entrepreneur before he was an artist or performer

"I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend. I didn’t want to be a trend, I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new ideas and new perspectives. And so I had to govern everything around that. So I pulled myself in, and decided to use the easiest medium to start off with -- which was rock and roll -- and to add bits and pieces to it over the years, so that by the end of it, I was my own medium."

Why councils are shutting down 'stop smoking' services

'Councils remain committed to helping smokers quit, however they face significant cuts to public health budgets this year, and spending large volumes of money on a service people are not using will fast undermine the cost-effectiveness of providing it.'

The powerful state damages society - always

"Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power."

People promoting meat don't like vegans much

"A provocative advertisement encouraging Australians to eat lamb has been criticised for discriminating against vegans and portraying excessive violence.

The advertisement, which has gone viral on social media and been viewed more than 250,000 times on YouTube, depicts a military campaign to bring Australians home from overseas so that they can eat lamb on Australia Day.

In a controversial scene that has reportedly sparked more than 60 complaints to the advertising watchdog, a team of special agents break into an Australian man’s apartment in New York and ignite a blowtorch after he reveals he has become a vegan."

You can watch the ad here.

Donald Trump and Bernie Saunders are mining the same seam of dissatisfaction

"While the white working class is shrinking in the US, it remains the largest voting block in the country. That may be why leaders of both parties are concerned that white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest and South, are supporting populist candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They don’t understand that many of these voters blame Wall Street, corporate leaders, and politicians – the East Coast establishment –for destroying their jobs and communities over the past few decades."

Robots will save the High Street

"Through all these varying examples, we see an automation of retail that develops itself in full speed. Whether it are new types of vending machines that help increase consumptive convenience, offering fresh and healthy products 24/7, or technology that changes our traditional ideas of ordering and preparing food in restaurant — it’s clear that retail landscapes and practices of consumption are strongly influenced by a sense of automation."

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We are reminded that unions are not in the consumer interest

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Izabella Kaminska - whose trendy lefty ignorance we've touched on before - says that the good folk who drive cabs for Uber need to unionise:

In the first instance, the Uber drivers working on these systems aim to withdraw supply en masse if rates go below their average break-even rates exposing customers to surge pricing more regularly. But the aim eventually is to gain collective bargaining power against Uber in all sorts of worker-rights disputes.

The point that Izabella is making revolves around here belief that Uber has too many (or rather allows for there to be too many) drivers or "ignoring the law of supply and demand" as she ignorantly puts it.

...Uber doesn’t really care about how many drivers are in the market at any particular time because the company is more concerned about taking a commission linked to total utilised capacity than ensuring supply and demand is ever properly matched. Nor do customers care about market imbalances since they are the temporary beneficiaries of the app’s arguably unsustainable cost structures.

The solution is for the drivers to unionise and to use this 'collective bargaining' to force Uber to place a limit on the number of drivers in any given taxi market. The argument for this this limit isn't consumer interest but a belief that somehow Uber's drivers are a special case in the 'being-exploited' stakes. And that this will happen:

The fundamental truth being ignored in the “sharing economy” is that exploited labour always wises up. That open-ended supply markets always form licensed communities to protect jobs and minimum wages. That unregulated markets inevitably self-regulate from the bottom up. And that workers always have an interest in aggregating and sharing the cost of risk and insurance between them, which is ultimately factored into the cost of service.

Or as Adam Smith put it:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”.

Indeed this is entirely what has happened in taxi markets - taxi operators and drivers, aided and abetted by local or national government, has placed expensive barriers in the way of market entry. And one of those contrivances - those conspiracies against the public - is the union. For the entire purpose of the union is to improve the lot of its members. For all the noble purposes laid claim to by unions the bare truth is that their purpose is seldom, if ever, in the interests of the consumers who use the services those union members provide or the products they produce. Indeed Izabella, in her lefty reverie concludes this too:

The core point really is that taxis can never serve customers as well as outright ownership of a private car in optionality terms — because taxis can never be perfectly supplied to meet peak rate time demand without somebody somewhere carrying the cost of off-peak idle capital. Nor can they, for that matter, ever be as cost effective as public transport.

If and when Uber drivers efficiently unionise to reduce the scale of oversupply in the market, we’ll finally understand that.

Let's leave aside the self-evident observation that this point is entirely contained in the fact that a train ride from Bingley to Leeds is less than a fiver whereas a taxi ride will costs you £40 or more. Instead let's consider what's being said here - essentially Uber, by not limiting how many drivers a market can hold, has pushed down prices. As a consumer this is excellent news - although the bus or the tube will still be cheaper, I'll take a 20% drop in fares as well as less reliance on surge pricing (because the increased demand for cabs on say New Years Eve means more drivers come out to meet that demand). If the drivers are unionised and succeed in 'reducing the scale of oversupply' the result will be a system more like the one we have.

It's clear that, wherever we look, unions - by promoting the interests of their members - act to raise costs, limit supply or otherwise act against the consumer interest. This is the case with doctors, lawyers and local government officers just as much as it is with taxi drivers. And this is why the activities of unions need to be regulated and limited - just as is the case with any rent-seeking anti-consumer cartel.

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The happiest of happy times - David Bowie and the remembering of childhood

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And we were a happy crew, me and you
We were a happy crew, me and you

Now this isn't a piece about how important David Bowie is to me and how my life will never be the same now he's gone - the great man's relevance to my life is about happenstance, about the fact that he was there at a happy time.

I've written before how the presence of David Bowie in my life was only realised some while after that presence had ended - for the simplest of simple reasons. The great man was still to be great and his nascent stardom wasn't of interest to a nine year old. But now, when I think about Bowie it's not a memory of a concert or how his music and lyrics meant something but of a time and place when I was part of a happy crew.

And this is how remembering works. It's one thing to speak of the influence and importance of a man just gone - if nothing else, within his genre Bowie was both influential and important. It's quite another for that passing to bring about a recollection of our own life and experience. I guess this is why those closest too us are mourned (and missed) most.

This remembering - informal, emotional, connected remembering - is even stronger when, as is my case with Bowie, when the recollection is of fun, happiness, joy and pleasure. I described the time I met Bowie like this:

For us boys this was brilliant - we weren't interested in the presence of the rock god but in the prospect of jungle adventure, tree climbing and the discussion of those things that matter to nine-year old boys. And we were looked after in that slightly offhand but rather sweet way of hippies. Someone fed us - usually something slightly spicy and pasta-y, probably vegetarian. It might have been Richard's mum, or the couple with a little toddler called Siddhartha, maybe even the rock god himself, this didn't impinge on us - we just welcomed the food.

Richard Finnegan and I were - in Spirogyra's words - a 'happy crew, me and you". And my remembering those happy times - and for me being ten was great - was triggered by the sad death of David Bowie. So in writing that they were the happiest of happy times, I have the child of a little tear in my eyes. Both at the death of a man who, in the tiniest of ways, was part of my life and also at remembering something fine that cannot be recreated - there's no going back to being ten except in that remembering:

When the subbuteo men broke (and finally refused to be re-glued) we played the game with my sisters farm set – minutes to go and it’s Sheep 2, Cows 1…

And climbing the cherry trees and digging for Roman remains in the garden (which of course we found in abundance)

Playing cricket with a big plastic ball and the roses as fielders – and ducking my Mum’s sandals when we knocked a flower off

Back then bikes were old, slightly rusty and lacked brakes – but we still raced down The Glade (with my little brother in the old pushchair – and that didn’t even have steering)

I hope - and know it's probably, mostly true - that today's nine and ten year olds have the same happiest of happy times. And I know that there will be something, not always a sad thing like a death, that will trigger the memory of those times, will bring the recollection and reflection - even the ghost of a smile to their lips. For me the opening chords of 'Space Oddity' will always take me back to that garden on Foxgrove Road, to the hippy bloke with the beard doing yoga, to Siddhartha (who'll be in his late forties now) and to our happy crew crashing through the undergrowth hunting aliens or seeking lost treasures.

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So ads for vaping don't 'normalise' smoking - no surprise (except to nannying fussbuckets)

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We know that the public health fraternity don't know the first thing about advertising, let alone understand how it works. Despite having assortments of higher degrees, the typical public health 'expert' still holds to the 'if advertising doesn't work, why do business advertise' line that's popular amongst thirteen-year-olds and sociology professors (except the latter will add the word 'neoliberalism' into their ignorant statement). Of course the rest of us know that advertising works by promoting the brand rather than the category. We also know that advertising of brands in one category absolutely doesn't promote the use of a different, competing category.

The latest study into ecig and vaping advertising confirms all this and is reported here (although the writer seems also not to understand that ads promote brands not categories):

The major study finding was that neither the flavored nor non-flavored e-cigarette advertisements affected the appeal of smoking to youth. This includes advertisements for e-cigarettes with candy flavors like bubble gum or chocolate. Instead, the study found that flavored e-cigarette advertisements affect youths' interest in trying and buying electronic cigarettes.

Importantly, the study also found no effect of exposure to e-cigarette advertisements on smoking susceptibility or the perceived harm of cigarettes.

The study concluded that: "Exposure to adverts for e-cigarettes does not seem to increase the appeal of tobacco smoking in children."

And, as the author then observes:

Advertising for a product that is being marketed as a more appealing alternative to a different product is going to increase the appeal of that product, not the inferior product. It also makes sense that e-cigarette advertising does not undermine youth's appreciation of the severe hazards of smoking. If anything, one might expect that e-cigarette marketing helps to reinforce the public's understanding of the hazards of smoking, since e-cigarettes are being presented as a favorable alternative to cigarettes.

Even the thirteen-year-olds will get this, I suspect. Will the nannying fussbuckets?

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The whole point about vaping and harm reduction

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So we're sat in a cafe in Bradford having something to eat. Outside the cafe there's a little gathering, about ten or twelve young people - boys and girls - aged 14 or 15. They're behaving exactly like you'd expect young people this age to behave - joshing with each other, lots of braggadocio from the boys, preening and giggling from the girls. All pretty normal and almost certainly a bunch of nice kids.

And three or four of them were vaping.

Now before you get all shocked, imagine the scene a few years ago. A dozen working class fifteen year olds in Bradford away from parents in the City centre - three or four of them would have been smoking good old-fashioned cigarettes. Instead they're vaping - doing something that Public Health England tell us is at least 95% safer than smoking.

It may be that you'd prefer these young people to do nothing - no smoking, no vaping. And maybe you're right in your preference. But if they're going to do something surely it's better they choose the least harmful option? Just like I was back in the 1970s, the young people are doing the naughty thing they're told not to do - in my case it led to being a heavy smoker for thirty years. For these young people their choice means they won't have the coughs, the shortness of breath and the massive risk of lung or throat cancer that I had.

Which is why it's very stupid to try and make vapers and vaping equivalent to smoking.

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Why the new drink limits are not just wrong but stupid

All set to break public health boozing guidelines

The government, in the form of the shockingly disingenuous Chief Medical Officer, has announced new guidelines on 'safe limits' for drinking alcohol.

...the new rules now state that both men and women should drink no more than 14 units over the course of three days or more. This is the equivalent of a bottle and a half of wine over the course of a week.

The rules also say that it's best not to "save up units" and drink them all in one go and to make sure you have alcohol-free days.

I don't intend to dwell on how these new guidelines are based on misleading (which is being kind) presentation of science - suffice it to say there's a pretty comprehensive debunking of the basis for the CMO's new guidelines from Chris Snowden.

Instead, I'm going to tell you why the new guidance is stupid. Utterly stupid. It's not just that these new guidelines won't change anything except for a few more very moderate or occasional drinkers to tip over into teetotallerhood and for the nannying fussbuckets to have a new a very big figure of 'hazardous' drinking to beat us up with. No it's that nearly everyone is going to completely ignore the guidance because they think it's a load of nonsense.

A bit like this - from piss take website UlsterFry:

The entire population of Northern Ireland fully intends to ignore the new, more stringent, alcohol limits unveiled by the Department of Health today, a survey made up by The Ulster Fry has revealed.

According to the new guidelines both men and women should limit themselves to 14 units a week, spread over at least three sessions. For the uninitiated, 14 units is the equivalent of not very many pints of beer, a Sunday afternoon amount of wine or a thimbleful of Buckfast.

However most people we spoke to weren’t too worried about the changes. “It seems men are limited to the same as women,” commented Harry Snatter, a 34 year draught excluder from Lurgan. “That’s fine with me, as my missus drinks like a bastard, in fact I’ll probably have to start drinking through the week to keep up with her.”

Every pub, bar, cafe and occasional drinking establishment will contain someone who will tell you - for absolute free - that the guidelines are "complete bollocks from a bunch of nannies". And trust me on this one, people won't believe the slightly unhealthy looking woman on the telly promoting the new abstemious guidance and will believe the bloke in the public bar. Mostly because the bloke in the bar is believable when he says "it probably not wise to get blasted every night -pace yourselves" whereas the crabby nanny on the box telling you that more than two sips of cooking sherry will give you breast cancer - even if you're a fella - is about as believable as Leeds United getting promoted in 2016.

As with everything about public health, it's enthusiasts kill successful programmes. UK alcohol consumption has been falling for a decade and while this doesn't seem to feed through to figures on alcohol harm (raising a doubt or two about whether drinking is, in any way, a public health issue - a problem for the whole population) it is testament to how effective the combination of sensible advice and a liberal approach to licensing the juice has been. Now, with this new temperance agenda - "risks from alcohol start from any level of regular drinking" as the BBC puts it - the public health people have guaranteed that their words and advice will get the sort of response usually reserved for opposition centre forwards and referees. Only maybe not quite so polite.

And we'll carry on drinking because the downside risks - a very small chance that we might have a very small increased risk of cancer - are vastly outweighted by the pleasure of drinking. We like alcohol, it has been with us longer than history and our bodies are pretty good at processing it in quantities far higher than the piddlingly small amounts in the new guidelines.

In the end lets recall that Churchill, that paragon of temperance value lived to 90 and the old Queen Mum got past 100:

As Queen Mum she had a steady pattern in her alcohol consumption that she held onto till her dying days in 2002. Major Colin Burgess, the personal attendant to the queen, describes this in the book Behind Palace Doors. According to Burgess Elizabeth would start at noon with a cocktail with 1 part gin and 2 parts Dubonnet, topped off with a slice of lemon or orange. The official name is a Zaza cocktail or a Dubonnet cocktail, but thanks to Elizabeth everyone around the world now calls it the Queen Mother cocktail.

At lunch the Queen Mum would drink red wine and after the meal a glass of port. According to Burgess she also insisted that the people around her joined her. When anyone dared to ask for water, Elizabeth would ask incredulously: “How can you not have wine with your meal?” At 6 in the afternoon it was what the Queen Mother would call ‘Magic Hour’ and she had herself a martini. And at dinner she would drink 2 glasses of Veuve Cliquot, a pink champagne. 

While trying to hold tight to this drinking schedule, her duties as queen and later Queen Mother didn’t always allow it. That’s why Elizabeth instructed her staff to hide bottles of gin in hatboxes when she was on the road, so she could have a secret sip whenever she wanted. As the Queen Mum herself once said: “I couldn’t get through all my engagements without a little something.”

That sounds about right! Up yours fussbuckets. Let's drink to a great 2016.

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It's a duck - Cologne and an everyday case of equalities top trumps

I'm not really very interested in trying to turn the awful events of new Year's Eve in Cologne into some sort of geopolitical narrative. I do take the view that if, as most reports suggest, most of the men assaulting young women, robbing and generally terrorising the centre of Cologne were recent arrivals - asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants - from North Africa and the Middle East then we need to think seriously about how we have responded to the migrant crisis.

But that's for another day. What I'm concerned about is how my fellow pinko pro-immigrant liberals have responded. Not by a genuine concern about how the response to the Syrian (and other) refugee crises and especially Angela Merkel's 'let 'em all in' strategy might be part of the problem but rather by either attempting to deny that the events had anything to do with migrants or else by attacking anyone who suggested that there might be a link as 'racist', 'islamaphobic' or 'bigoted'.

This sense of denial has led to all sorts of lunatic contortions up to and including suggestions that the whole thing might have been orchestrated by sinister anti-immigrant forces looking to get the German government to close the borders. Or even by ISIS. This sort of conspiracy theorising is where the duck comes in:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

If nearly every report - from those assaulted, from witnesses and onlookers, from the police and from German government sources - says that nearly all those involved in the rape, sexual attacks and robbery were North African or Middle Eastern men, then we should accept that this is the case. This isn't a gross slur on immigrants. Germany registered  964,574 new asylum seekers in the first 11 months of last year - even the worst descriptions of the mayhem in Cologne put the numbers at no more than a thousand. But if a minority of that million are, by these acts of sexual violence and robbery, making it harder for asylum seekers who just want to get on with a quiet decent life then that minority need to be dealt with. Not in the interests of the 'host' community but in the interests of the majority of decent immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

This brings us to the second response from my fellow pinko immigration fans. Best typified by this quotation from Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian:

Young German women thankfully enjoy historically unprecedented economic and sexual freedom, with their expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year’s Eve however they want. The same isn’t always true of young male migrants exchanging life under repressive regimes, where they may at least have enjoyed superiority over women, for scraping by at the bottom of Europe’s social and economic food chain. It is not madness to ask if this has anything to do with attacks that render confident, seemingly lucky young women humiliated and powerless. 

Many of us will remember the reclaim the night campaigns - now rebadged and more in-your-face as slut walks - that told us that what a woman wore, how she spoke and where she went was never under any circumstances an excuse for rape or sexual violence. And this viewpoint is quite rightly reinforced again and again as people remind us that one of the rights women fought for was a right to walk safely everywhere, to be able to go about their business without the need for a man to protect them. So when Ms Hinsliff suggests that somehow those German women with their "expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year's Eve however they want" were partly to blame for their sexual assaults, she denies all of those efforts to liberate women by suggesting that their nice clothes, nice phone and fancy handbag invited an assault.

This is the worst sort of equalities top trumps - the inability to criticise immigration policy or the behaviour of a group of immigrants because that might be racism or islamaphobia trumps the properly shocked response to violent sexual assaults on women in a public square at the heart of a West European city.

“When we came out of the station, we were very surprised by the group we met, which was made up only of foreign men … We walked through the group of men, there was a tunnel through them, we walked through … I was groped everywhere. It was a nightmare. Although we shouted and hit them, the men didn’t stop. I was horrified and I think I was touched around 100 times over the 200 metres.”

We know to our cost - from places like Rotherham as well as from what happened in Cologne - that if we pretend that something isn't the case when it is, for fear of 'equalities', the result is more damaging to society and more damaging to the community from where the problem emanates. Do you really think that young Syrian men in Germany who aren't - and wouldn't consider - raping or sexually assaulting anyone wouldn't want the rapists from their community dealt with? Yet kind, caring and usually thoughtful people tiptoe round the truth as if it can't be touched. And because something has to be said and done, these same kind, caring and usually thoughtful people either come up with ridiculous conspiracy theories or else say things that sound like victim-blaming.

For my part, what we've seen challenges my support for more open immigration policies. I still believe this to be right but what we've seen in Cologne - and it's suggested in other places too - perhaps means people like me need to pause for thought and consider whether our gung ho 'let 'em all in' view is in the interests of both the communities of Europe and the immigrants themselves. If the consequence of such a huge and sudden influx is more events like those in Cologne leading to more division, more mistrust, more racism and more bad government then perhaps we need to listen more to those decent folk who say be careful what you wish for when you invite immigration.

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In which the medical profession reminds us how monumentally stupid it is

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Seriously these doctors are utterly ignorant, they have not the first conception of human behaviour:

Norway's biggest medical organisation wants to ban the sale of cigarettes to adults.

In a drive towards a smoke-free society by 2035, the Norwegian Medical Association (NMA) is pressing the government to back its proposal for a ban on tobacco sales to citizens born after the year 2000.

What could go wrong here? Right now it's anyone younger than 16 which I'm guess means they can't buy fags anyway. They do however have friends who are 17 and can buy fags. And since the stupid doctors don't intend to ban possession of cigarettes, this secondary market (doubtless a pretty profitable one) still exists and won't go away until the last of those 17 year olds has died in about eighty years time. All this, of course, is without the capacity of Norwegians to pop to Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Finland, the Baltic States from where they can bring back - perfectly legally - loads of cigarettes.

Fortunately Norway has some politicians with a modicum of common sense:

Yet despite the NMA's hopes, health spokespeople for the Conservative, Labour, Centre and Christian Democrats parties in the country told Aftenposten the idea was not currently feasible.

Indeed the idea will never be feasible. In other news teen smoking in most places - including Norway and the UK - is at its lowest ever level. Something that's down to vaping and nothing to do with public health at all. Not that the health fascists and nannying fussbuckets will ever admit to this.

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Quote of the day - on the dishonesty of public health

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My experience tells me this is true - the discipline of public health is no more 'evidence-based' than is theology.

Public health, including the research, politics, regulation, and journalism surrounding it, is an inherently dishonest discipline. By that I obviously do not mean that every single person involved is a liar. I obviously do not mean that everything done or written in the area is wrong. What I mean is that the field has no checks on dishonesty. It does not discourage it, and it certainly does not punish it. In most cases, it actively rewards it. There is no culture of duty or honor in the field, and thus no notion of what it means to behave like a real honest scientist. As a result, nonsense abounds. Those who actively take advantage of the opportunity to be dishonest flourish and rise in stature. The resulting core rot permeates the entire space.

Sad I know but true.

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In which Labour becomes the NHS Action Party

In the run up to last year's general election a bunch of self-important left-wing doctors set up a thing called the National Health Action Party:

We believe a political party is needed to defend the NHS and its values. The NHS is more than just a structure for the delivery of healthcare. It is also a social institution that reflects national solidarity, expresses the values of equity and universalism, and institutionalises the duty of government to care for all in society. The NHS marks out a space in society where the dictates of commerce and the market should be held in check. We are fighting now to ensure that it is patients not profits that are the driving force behind our NHS. We hope you will join us.

In truth, this party was simply a vehicle for activists within the NHS to defend the interests of people who work - and profit from - the NHS. They targeted a few high profile politicians (the prime minister, the health secretary and so forth) and garnered the grand total of 20,000 votes with over 7,000 of those going to the former MP for Wyre Forest (in that constituency). The party's top cheerleader, Clive Peedell got 600 or so votes in Witney.

The National Health Action Party is still out there banging the rocks together but its relevence - in so far as it ever had any - had paled. Indeed it seems at times that with Labour now only having a poll lead on the NHS, that party has shoved aside the 'NHS Producer Interest Party' as I prefer to call it. Others have noticed too:

To put it brutally, we often give the impression that we'd prefer it if everyone could just work in the public sector, and ideally for the NHS. When we talk about self-employed people it's often as if we believe they must have been forced into it. We pay scant attention to arguments around competitiveness, especially global competition, and even where the evidence of competition working well is all around us (have you seen how cheap broadband is these days?) we are reluctant to acknowledge it. For some “competition' itself is a dirty word.

This is where Labour has got to and it has everything to do with who owns and runs the Labour Party. We look at Jeremy Corbyn, laugh at his political antics, and assume that a different, moderate leader would make all the difference. We point at a bunch of impressive younger MPs saying that they might be leader - Jess Phillips, Stella Creasy, Michael Dugher, Mary Creagh - but fail to ask where the policy platform will come from, whether those putative leaders will recognise that basing your politics on producer interests, albeit public sector producer interests, repeats the mistakes that led to 1979 and the destruction of 1983?

Labour's problem isn't a lack of intelligent, capable centre-left MPs but rather that the Party's policy platform is controlled by public sector producer interests. Opposition to more open international trade in services, for example, derives not from any valid economic argument but from the fear that the public sector managers who control the Labour Party will have to justify their effectiveness in a competitive environment. At the same time Labour has no idea - not the slightest inkling - how the private sector operates, what it's actually like to work in this sector and why most workers reject the stifling dullness of public sector work in favour of riskier but, in the end, better rewarded private sector work.

Until the advent of Tony Blair's New Labour, Britain's mainstream left-wing party had always been the vehicle for producer interests primarily through the trade union movement (which, of course, founded the Labour Party). Hence state monopoly, protectionism, price intervention and a host of anti-competition regulations badged as "workers rights". Today, with the trade unions all but extinct in the private sector, the Party's battle is wholly about defending the interests of public sector workers. The idea that, through new technology, innovation and efficiency, we can deliver the same public service outcomes is as much anathema to today's Labour as they were to the old Luddite union-led party - the one that crippled our manufacturing base and destroyed those communities they now mythologise.

What New Labour did - and what the Party has now rejected - was to recognise that the British public are, first and foremost, consumers in a consumer society and that their preference is for access to those consumer goodies the hair-shirted hard left sees as the baubles of late capitalist decadence. By rejecting this commitment to making the consumer society fairer, Labour has turned its backs on the idea that economic growth can - and usually does - mean a better world for everyone. Especially where there is a party not tied to crony capitalists and rent-seekers able to ensure the milk and honey of that richer land flows to all who live there.

Today's Labour Party - underneath the shouty rhetoric about 'austerity', 'equality' and 'fairness' - is a party that rejects competition, choice, innovation and efficiency. A Party that places the interests of those who work in the public sector - not just the low paid cleaners, road sweepers and caterers but well-paid administrative staff, 'fat cat' NHS bosses and, of course, the miners of the modern Labour Party, doctors. The Party - just like Clive Peedell's National Health Action Party - isn't interested in challenging the way the NHS works but rather in coating the whole thing in the aspic of changelessness, in the deranged assumption that Bevan's back-of-an-envelope fix can't be improved upon. The Labour Party has become the NHS Action Party.

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Temperance scaremongering about old people drinking

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Accompanied by a stock photograph of a grey-haired couple with a glass of wine, the latest piece of anti-booze scaremongering has hit the news:

New figures show that dangerously high levels of alcohol consumption by baby boomers are leading to growing numbers of over-65s being hospitalised, adding to pressures on the NHS. “The number of older people drinking unsafely and unhealthily is rising at an alarming rate, putting their health at risk and further strain on NHS services,” said Dr Tony Rao, Britain’s leading expert on older people’s drinking.

It seems that boozed-up oldies are swamping the hospitals as they succumb to something called by the doctors "mental and behavioural disorders related to alcohol use". It's not clear what exactly these mental and behavioural disorders are (or indeed whether they are directly related to alcohol or merely exacerbated by drinking). Dr Rao though has seen a huge increase in patients at his clinics:

“Ten years ago I would have been treating no more than three people at any one time for alcohol-related brain damage. Now there are at least 10 patients with that in the service I work in.”

Yes folks, this entire story is about ten people in South London who have Korsakoff Syndrome - hardly a problem that is going to 'bankrupt' the NHS. And we don't even know whether Dr Rao's ten patients are over 65 and whether what they have is Korsakoff Syndrome or some other form of alcohol induced brain damage. The truth here - and this is hinted at in the article - is that the patients admitted to hospital for these 'mental and behavioural disorders' are people with a long history of heavy drinking. This isn't about that couple in the picture having a glass of wine with dinner but about people we might call 'serious drinkers'.

And all this ignores the well-established evidence showing a link between moderate alcohol consumption and reduced incidence of dementia:

The inverse relationship between moderate wine drinking and incident dementia was explained neither by known predictors of dementia nor by medical, psychological or socio-familial factors. These results were confirmed from data of the Rotterdam study. Light-to-moderate drinking (one to three drinks per day) was significantly associated with a lower risk of any dementia (hazard ratio 0.58 [95% CI 0.38-0.90]) and vascular dementia (hazard ratio 0.29 [0.09-0.93]). No evidence that the relation between alcohol and dementia varied by type of alcoholic beverage was found.

Not that the temperance lobby are interested in this sort of evidence. They prefer to scaremonger.

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